THE FRAGILITY OF FREEDOM
Freedom, says the Master, Dr Joseph Spence, must never be taken for granted, and with it comes responsibility
W e all think we want to be afforded total freedom of action, but we often find that we do better, for ourselves and for others, when we work within social or ethical parameters. I believe we should work for a society that can do away with freedom from want: that is from hunger, from homelessness, from illiteracy and innumeracy, from fear and from abuse or neglect. I’m less convinced we will ever have a society in which everyone can have the freedom to do and say anything, and be who they want to be. The barrier to such total freedom is that the freedom of one person or group tends, by its nature, to impact negatively on the freedom of others. Exercising my right to total freedom of expression can cause offence and upset to others; my use of the right to freedom of (mass) assembly can appear threatening to others; my exercise of freedom of worship leads me to promote ideas not seen as liberating by others. But we can work together towards freedom from want. I’ve been reading the Romantic poets recently and Shel- ley’s belief that ‘no man has a right to monopolize more than he can enjoy (Declaration of Rights, 1812) strikes me as an early statement of what is being talked about in current public discourse as Sufficientarianism. When I dis- cussed this idea with Rev Tim Buckler, he was reminded of Gandhi’s dictum: ‘The world has enough for everyone’s needs, but not for everyone’s greed.’ Sufficientarianism is a theory of distributive justice that suggests that while we cannot overcome all social inequal- ities we can work towards a sufficiency threshold. That is, that we should look to make the lives of the least well
off in society sustainable, by ensuring that each of us has enough (and, by implication, no one has too much, held at the expense of or to the detriment of others): enough food to live on and space to live in, enough education through which to make informed life choices, enough time away from work to enjoy the fruits of our labours.
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THE ALLEYNIAN 712
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